Lee Yoo-young Looks for Brighter Fare After Hit Crime Series

Lee Yoo-young has made her first TV appearance in time slip crime drama "Tunnel," which recently wrapped up with the highest ratings in the history of cable channel OCN.

Lee had no ambitions when she was 20. She gave up college and worked part-time in a beauty salon, but then decided to go back to her studies as she felt sorry for her mother. She entered Korea National University of Arts in 2010 and studied acting.

A student film changed her life. "I saw myself on the screen in class. It was the first time I saw myself acting as an audience, and that was the moment I was seriously thinking about being an actress," she recalls.

Before long she had won best actress at the Milan International Film Festival for "Late Spring" in 2014, where she played a poor country woman who works as a nude model for a frustrated sculptor.

She has appeared in several films since including "The Treacherous" and "Yourself and Yours" and now ended her first TV series.

"To play my character, I studied the psychology of criminals, reading profiling books," she said. "Now I think want to show a brighter side of myself in my next project."